Reflex – Dev Diary 79
It’s been a couple of weeks since the big Steam release and everything seems to be going smoothly. There have been no bug reports so far, so I am continuing with developing the Android version.
Google Play achievements and save games work somewhat differently from Steam and this has required a few alterations here and there to get things working.
Save Games
When saving on Android the game will store the 3 save slots using the player’s name as an indent. This ensures that if the device is used with multiple profiles on Google Play the game can switch between the save slots.
Achievements
These are synced with Google-like with Steam. However, Google allows the achievement to be set as an increment. For example, the achievement for breaking 20 doors; on Steam the achievement doesn’t know how far the player has got, however, with Google’s integration the achievement display has tracking. It’s a small difference but it meant significant alterations to how I updated achievement information internally.
Testing
Playtesting of the Android version is going well. Worlds 1-4 are fully tested and I’m more than halfway through the last world (or I should say my playtester is halfway through).
Change Log
As I’ve been working on the Android version there were a few tweaks that were pushed to the Steam version:
- Level 4.14 was tweaked so that it is fairer. There were too many times when the missile would fly straight back out of the base.
- The deceleration of missiles when they are on top of each other was removed. I didn’t like how it would force a slow down of the missiles – it looked unnatural.
- The final level (5.24d) needed a speed change as with a recent change to how missiles interact with each other the speed of play on the last stage was too fast – even for me!
- Texture sheet compression was changed to decrease load times on Android. A recent alteration on GameMaker’s part with the default compression of sprites meant that loading times on Android were unacceptably high.
- In some situations, the holder component could not be deconstructed because two missiles were interacting with it at the same time. This has been fixed and the component can now always be deconstructed.
- The maximum number of missiles that the player can have at any one time has been increased from 10 to 16.